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Running Windows 7 under OS X: Ars reviews VMware Fusion 3

VMware has released the latest version of the popular Mac virtualization …

VMware Fusion 3 was released last week into the anxiously trembling hands of desktop virtualization junkies, and we've run the release through a gamut of heavy tests to see if it's able to meet the hype.

At first glance, 3.0 doesn't look to be teeming with new features, but the changes that are there are significant:

That's quite a beefy set of coding accomplishments. Let's see if they were pulled off without any casualties.

Test Hardware

Mac Pro 2009 Xeon 5500 dual quad 2.66 GHz

24GB RAM

Mac OS X 10.6.1 (64-bit kernel)

MacBook Pro Santa Rosa 2.4GHz

4GB RAM

Mac OS X 10.6.1 (32-bit kernel)

System Requirements

Any Mac with an Intel processor

1GB of RAM, 2GB recommended

700MB of free disk space for VMware Fusion, and at least 5GB of free disk space for each virtual machine

Mac OS X version 10.5.8 or later; Mac OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard or later

Pricing

New license: $79.99

Upgrade from 1.0/2.0: $39.99

Installation and VM upgrading

For users wondering whether 2.0 VMs will work in 3.0, the answer is yes, with no exceptions. The VM update process is very straightforward: update the application and update your VMware Tools inside your existing VM, reboot your VM, and you're done. In my experience, there were no problems upgrading 2.0 VMs, but I did have a problem with my Vista 64-bit Boot Camp partition:

I hadn't used the Boot Camp VMware install for a very long time, so this error could have been caused by any number of things. I think I had installed a new version of Windows on the VM, so it was completely out of sync with the VMware files. It was easily fixed by deleting all the VMware files from that folder referenced in the error, reimporting Boot Camp into VMware, and reinstalling the VMware Tools. Save for that hiccup, upgrading my rather large library of test VMs was pretty painless.

Interface and Integration Enhancements

The VMware interface was always very functional with decent integration, but version 3 makes some welcome tweaks. The menus have been rearranged and the hub of interacting with VMs, the Virtual Machine Library, got an overhaul to make it more welcoming:

The Home portion of the VM Library window is a list of application assistants for various starting point tasks.

Those are all pretty unremarkable except for the new switcher-friendly ability to convert a Windows PC to a VM. While the "Connect your PC to your Mac with a simple Ethernet cable" migration tool is cool, if you install Apple's Bonjour for Windows, you can automatically discover your PC on the network and do the import that way. I couldn't try a real "PC" conversion since I only have an old dusty Athlon with no hard drive and I don't have any IDE disks around to toss into the dinosaur. So I faked it and booted up my MacBook Pro into Boot Camped Windows XP 32-bit, installed the Bonjour Tools and the VMware Migration Assistant (thank you for not calling it a Wizard), and started the Bonjour-based migration:

I waited for a while for the Assistant to find my Windows MacBook Pro but with no luck. I restarted the MacBook Pro and when the Windows Assistant loaded on boot, I tried again and it managed to find the machine and prompted me to save the VM file:

The Space Needed value is way off—my Windows Boot Camp partition is actually 20GB and it only uses 11 of that. Nevertheless, my imported VM file was 304GB:

So it seems that the assistant just reports the C: drive's disk size, not the actual contents, unless this is a problem with the Apple GUID partition table interpretation. Worse, the VM refused to boot. I hesitate to be critical of this since it's likely tripping on the Boot Camp partitioning scheme, which wouldn't be a factor for someone wanting to migrate from a genuine Windows PC. I wish I could say for certain whether this was the case, but all my neighbors have Macs as well (in the Plateau Montreal, you're either a graphic designer or a photographer), so I can't test this feature the way it's meant to be tested.

55 Reader Comments

I have been running it for a few days now, and at least with Windows 7, VMWare seems to be pretty solid. My ONE WISH is that they would have Firewire support. I need to gook a camera up to my Mac and Firewire is the only connection it has. Windows does not even know that it's attached. That is my one complaint.

"For users wondering whether 2.0 VMs will work in 3.0, the answer is yes, with no exceptions."

No, there are definitely exceptions. See the VMWare community boards where people are having a lot of difficulties with opening up VM's from 2.0 that had particular AV programs, or like me who's entire Mac came to a screeching halt so badly that I had to hold the power button down. The fix? Remove VMTools and reinstall. Sure it worked, but that kind of thing never has happened before, and it shouldn't happen at all.

Also, gaming in VM's continues to be useless, and their continued marketing of it is borderline false advertising. In Boot Camp I get 60fps in L4D. In Fusion 3, I get 10-15fps. This is on a 9600m equipped MBP. On a Mac Pro with a 4670, it's 100fps Boot Camp, 20fps Fusion. In other words, not playable.

Also, why was Parallels mentioned but not the free and excellent VirtualBox? VirtualBox runs Windows 7 faster than Fusion 3 (can't speak for Parallels) and it is every bit as stable.

Last night I discovered my mostly Java remote image viewer (for medical images, DICOM if you know what that is) from Emageon would not display images correctly. It looked just like the "buffer error" picture in the Fusion 3 review. It was not a problem with Fusion 2. This is on a MP quad-core with 12 GB RAM and 4870 ATI.

Actually a show-stopper unless it's fixed. Might have to go back to Fusion 2 or maybe I'll try VirtualBox.

I have been using it for sometime. It's great when it works, and it isn't when it doesn't work.

I have a least powerful machine to play with on this situation. I have a 3rd gen Mac Mini with 2 GB RAM. I noticed that the Virtual Machine just chokes on a lot of occasions. Other than that, I love my Mac Mini b/c of its quiet operation condition except the superdrive making noise when it reads cd or dvd.

Originally posted by Car Analogy:Just to let everyone know, Aero support does not work AT ALL with a Macbook. I would imagine the same would be for a Mac Mini.

There's a bug in Fusion's support for 3D on the Intel GMA chipset used in the original MacBook and Mac mini. Current MacBook and Mac mini systems use an NVIDIA chipset; the problem doesn't exist there.

On the first page, you state that the "size needed" calculation is way off, which it appears to be but is actually an issue of units. Snow Leopard switched from using base two (GiB) to base ten (GB) sizes, but every applications (sans Finder of course) still uses the traditional and normal unit. So 286.4 GiB = 307.5 GB. The value is still off by a little, but only about 3 GB, and its under rather than over.

Dave -- Yeah, I'm not sure what you mean by "Can run 64-bit VMs on a 32-bit machine". If you mean 32-bit CPUs, no, it can't. If you mean on a 32-bit version of Mac OS with 64-bit CPUs underneath, sure, but Fusion's always been able to do that.

Originally posted by The Real Blastdoor:How does a game like Civ 4 do? I bought Civ 4 back before I switched to a Mac. Right now I run it in bootcamp, but it would be so much easier if I didn't have to do that.

Originally with Mac OS X 10.6 and 10.6.1, I couldn't run Civ 4 on my system (Mac Pro with ATI Radeon HD 2600).

Well I'm running Autodesk Inventor2008 on a 2008 iMac w/4g ram w/XP SP3. I'm giving VMware3 1200 MB. I've been using VMware2 for over a year and it preformed quite well but this one has blue screened a couple of times but it seems stable enough now (I may not've given it enough MB). In Inventor, it's not fluid like in boot camp but still workable. Have to be aware of the F keys; I've have not quite figured out how to set them up yet. If you know Inventor, it's a fat pig so AutoCAD won't be a problem... except maybe in 3D where it gets a bit glitchy but still workable -you can see it catch-up when rotating heavy drawings over ½ meg but it's not a rotating slide-show thank gawd! But I did try a 15meg dwg on cont. orbit (with a ½ meg and a 8 meg .dwg opened) and it did take about 3 minute to muster up enough oomph to begin its slow rotating 'slide-show'. Then I tried to open a folder and after about a minute -AutoCAD crashed.

I wouldn't use the essentials while VMware is paused. It will un-pause and VMware ran like shit. Had to restart.

I was hoping to run games in VM but looking at your videos, I may have to reconsider.

I tried out both VMWare 3 and Parallels 5, and for use with Rhino, AutoCAD, Microstation/Generative Components, and Firefox: Parallels 5 wins hands down.

Much better OpenGl support,Faster, and lighter on your Mac. If its in the background long enough it essentially auto-pauses (releasing a bunch of memory and threads)... This sounds potentially terrible, as earlier versions took forever to resume from suspend, but this form of pausing is remarkable quick to resume. The end result being a really lightweight VM that only grabs all that memory when its in use.

I just finished to read your review. It's a great piece of work. Thanks!

Just one thing confused me for a while.

VMware Fusion 3 advantages:

* 64-bit kernel extension and application (Parallels' runs on Snow Leopard but all components are 32-bit)

Parallels Desktop 4 advantages:

* Can run 64-bit VMs on a 32-bit machine

I thought that you contradict yourself with this "bullets", but I guess that Parallels Desktop 4 runs 64-bit VMs on earlier Versions than SL. In this case it wouldn't be a discrepancy, but if I'm wrong please correct me.

Can't wait for an exhaustive review of Parallels 5. My wife's been playing DDO in Parallel 5 running in Win 7 Pro on top of both OS x 10.5 and now recently upgraded it to 10.6 with no issues (on a Macbook pro 15" 2.66, late 2009 edition). This is a boot camp partition as a VM. No issues switching bertween running as a VM and running natively in bootcamp either.

Runs with "medium high" settings with very little stutter at all once the game's been running on a map for 30 seconds or so (stutters a bit in boot camp too, so i think it's map artifact load time from the 5400RPM drive).

I love coherence and crystal modes, switching is great, as is the native integration with the doc, and even the ability to "define" file extensions on mac partitions to be lauched by applications inside a sleeping Windows VM (if I open a Word doc for instance, even if Parallels is off, it launches the OS, then launches Word, and opens the doc, REAL handy!) Graphic performance is pretty close between native boot camp and the VM (only slight performance degredation, likely I/O related, not CPU/GPU). Highly playable, evough that rebooting to windows in native mode is not worth it.

As I'm completely new to the VM Mac solutions (and a Windows convert, to boot), I'm totally lost as to what to use.I just received a new 27" i Mac with the i7 CPU. I'll have to re-read the review, but right now I don't really have a feeling for what doing "simple" tasks is like.

I want to compare VirtualBox 3, Fusion 3, and Parallels 5, but don't have a clue yet.

How easy (and quick) to open a MS Word doc, or an email in MS Firefox, and open it (by drag and drop I hope) in Mac iWork or Safari or whatever.

It looks like I'll have to use the trial versions of each and see for myself.I'll test with Windows 2000, then after I purchase wipe everything and install Windows 7.

Please don't forget us neophytes who don't much know a "dock" from a "finder".Well, almost.

@arklab:I haven't used VirtualBox, but as for the other two and what you're descibing using them for:

First of all I'm not exactly sure why you'd want to get into using a virtual machine and running windows just to use MS Word and Firefox, since there are mac versions of both.

But that said: both VMWare 3 and Parallels 5 are excellent solutions to running windows on your Mac. If you don't use processor/graphics intensive software like Games, 3d Modeling/Rendering, Scientific, or other software that really burns up CPU cycles, it doesn't really matter which one you use. If you do use software like this, I'd recommend Parallels if you go the VM route (as opposed to boot camp).

What it will come down to for you is the slight variations in UI and OS X integration. Both have "modes" which attempt to hide the Windows aspect of your virtual machine and just let your run Windows applications as if they're OS X apps. In these modes, Expose will act on each Windows' window exposing them as if they were OS X windows. It's with these modes that VMWare and Parallels differ, not that one is necessarily better than the other, but it will come down to your preference.

If you want to download and try out each one: here's the trick/pain in the ass:Setting up a virtual machine can be a time consuming affair. You're essentially installing windows into a new computer (a virtual one), and if you've ever installed Windows before than you have just shuddered, no doubt. To minimize how often you do this I'd recommend trying out VMware first and then Parallels.

This is so that, after setting up a new virtual machine in VMware, when you go to try out Parallels it can just import/convert your VMware virtual machine into Parallel's format. VMware can do this too, but Parallels is a bit better at converting Vmware machines than vice-versa.

I don't know how/where VirtualBox would fit into that order.

quote:

Originally posted by arklab:I want to compare VirtualBox 3, Fusion 3, and Parallels 5, but don't have a clue yet.

How easy (and quick) to open a MS Word doc, or an email in MS Firefox, and open it (by drag and drop I hope) in Mac iWork or Safari or whatever.

Good news: Parallels 5 makes TF2 actually playable. It's pretty slow loading resources (textures/models/sounds) the first time they are used, but after you walk around for ~2 min, it's surprisingly playable... even at decent resolutions and graphics settings.

I just wish whomever is responsible would make it load all the resources up front, something that seems obvious from my point of view. Honestly, what else is it doing when it has the loading screen?

disclaimer: I have not used a Mac for years and am not sure this is an issue but am raising the question due to my interest in Virtual Machines in general.

The migration assistant seems to be a tool that is a bit too powerful. I would imagine most people create an image of their Windows machine, load it in VMWare, but at the same time continue to use the Windows license on the original machine.